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Facilitator: Carey Glass, CPsychol
Date: 21st June 2007
Location: British Psychological Society London Office, Tabernacle Street, London
‘If today was really useful to you, how would you know that afterwards?’ asks Carey Glass at the outset. ‘And what else would you notice?’ We might be using new words, new ideas, new stories over the course of the next week. We might notice new motivation and energy. We might have met people who would help us make or revisit connections.
At the very least, ‘I hope everyone will have a lazy step to take away today that will take you towards your solution. Spy on yourself and look for tiny things that are helping: think baby food and it turns out to be caviar!’
In solution focused coaching, the coach hears the client on the subject of the ‘problem’ only as far as this conversation helps ‘develop rapport, show empathy, and enable the client to move on’. It is quite permissible to experiment with not talking about the problem at all as it is ‘irrelevant to the solution’ and the coach also has ‘no idea where the solution will come from’. As Gregory Bateson (1972) pointed out, the solution comes from a second, or higher, order of thinking.
At the heart of Solution-Focused (SF) coaching lies the miracle question as rephrased by Carey Glass: ‘Suppose you leave at the end of the day and return to your office or home, and later go to bed. And in the middle of the night, when you are fast asleep, a miracle happens and the problem you came here to solve is no longer a problem. The catch is that you were asleep, so how are you going to notice that the miracle happened? ... What else are you going to notice? What else?’
Here the coach or ‘study-buddy’ offers the following:
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A focus on positive goals - what the client will do, rather than what they will not do: ‘So you’ll be feeling less ‘put upon’ how will you feel instead and what will that feeling help you to do?’
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Scaling questions, much used in coaching, have their roots in Solutions Focus: ‘Where are you now towards that solution on a scale of 0 to 10? What would it take to move you from a 4 to a 5 on this? How much is good enough?’.
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Coping questions enter in if the client finds they are at zero: ‘I can see that things have been really difficult for you, yet I’m struck by the fact that, even so, you manage to get up each morning, get yourself to work and get your job done. How do you do that?’ Genuine curiosity and admiration can help to highlight strengths without appearing to contradict the client’s view of reality.
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Exception-Finding Questions: the insistence that there will be exceptions for the client to find in terms of instances in which the problem did not occur. The client is invited to identify these and to work out what they themselves did differently in that case. If they did it then, they can do it again in future.
Unlike Appreciative Inquiry, which originated as a way of looking at organisations, Carey Glass reminds us that Solution Focus (SF) was developed at the Brief Family Therapy Centre in Milwaukee as a form of individual therapy. Instigated by Steve de Shazer and Insoo Kim Berg and colleagues, and also known as ‘brief therapy’, it only later spread internationally into the fields of management and consulting ‘for which it is brilliantly well suited as it works directly with solutions, is future focused, fast and measures change’, says Carey Glass who sees SF as a form of ‘positive behaviourism’.
Early empirical research based on a comparison between what therapy proposed to do and its observable results, began to establish SF as an evidence-based approach (de Shazer, Berg et al., 1986), suggesting that this kind of therapy was effective ‘within a short period of time and a limited number of sessions’ and ‘even when complaints and/or goals are vague and not well defined’.
The work at the Milwaukee Centre built on that of a number of other innovators, such as Milton Erickson and the group exploring patterns in communication as well as family therapy at the Mental Research Institute at Palo Alto: Gregory Bateson, Don Jackson, Paul Watzlawick, John Weakland, Virginia Satir, Jay Haley and others (e.g. Watzlawick & Weakland, 1977). The work that arose out of these collaborations came to be seen by some as a revolution in the way we think about social functioning and wellbeing.
Broaden-and-Build
Cary Glass refers extensively to the higher motivation and wider possibilities generated by a positive outlook and accompanying emotions.
Carey points enthusiastically to the work of Barbara Fredrickson at the University of Michigan and more recently the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In the work of Fredrickson and colleagues (2005), positive emotions are hypothesized to undo the ‘cardiovascular aftereffects of negative emotions’ (commonly known as ‘stress’!). Their studies have randomly assigned participants to watch films that induce positive emotions such as amusement and contentment, negative emotions such as fear and sadness, or no emotions. Compared to people in the other conditions, participants who experience positive emotions go on to demonstrate heightened levels of creativity, inventiveness, and ‘big picture’ focus in further tasks, giving rise to the broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions.
Jennifer Liston-Smith
SGCP Conference & Events Correspondent
References
Bateson, G. (1972). Steps to an ecology of mind: Collected essays in anthropology, psychiatry, evolution, and epistemology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Cooperrider, D.L. & Srivastva, S. (1987). Appreciative inquiry in organizational life. Research in Organizational Change & Development, 1, 129-169.
de Shazer, S., Berg, I.K., Lipchik, E., Nunnally, E. et al. (1986). Brief therapy: Focused solution development. Family Process, 25(2), June, 207-221.
Fadiga, L., Fogassi, L., Pavesi, G. & Rizzolatti, G. (1995). Motor facilitation during action observation: A magnetic stimulation study. J. Neurophysiol, 73(6), June, 2608-2611.
Fredrickson, B.L. & Branigan, C.A. (2005). Positive emotions broaden the scope of attention and thought-action repertoires. Cognition and Emotion, 19, 313-332.
Orem, S.L,, Blinkert, J. & Clancy, A.L. (2007). Appreciative coaching: A positive process for change. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Rizzolatti G. & Craighero L. (2004). The mirrorneuron system. Annual Review of Neuroscience, 27, 169-192.
Watzlawick, P. & Weakland, J.H. (Eds.) (1977). The interactional view: Studies at the Mental Research Institute, Palo Alto, 1965-1974. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.
This review appeared as an article in the The Coaching Psychologist Volume 4, Issue 2
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